Google’s having a good day. For one thing, it’s “Searchology Day” and the search giant is announcing a boat-load of enhancements to its search tools. (Danny Sullivan is recapping the interesting sounding developments here.)
More importantly, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled today that Google’s image search results don’t constitute direct infringement when copyrighted images show up in the results. (Public Knowledge’s Sherwin Sly has a quick summary and analysis of the decision here and the group has posted the full decision here.)
To briefly recap the background: A company called Perfect 10 Inc. (which sells photos of naked women who are, well, perfect “10s”) sued Google for copyright infringement because its copyrighted images were captured as thumbnails through Google’s image search. The District Court for the Central District of California basically ruled in favor of Perfect 10 and enjoined Google from showing Perfect 10’s images. Both companies appealed for different reasons, but Google had the most at stake.
The appeals court reversed, favorably for Google, some parts of the lower court’s decision, but more importantly it found that Google’s image search didn’t violate Perfect 10’s copyright, even though Google reproduced entirely, albeit in thumbnail format, Perfect 10’s photos.
The court found that Google’s thumbnails are “fair use” and did so in a very interesting way. The three-judge panel basically said that the image search results, even though all they do is replicate the content in whole, are “transformative” and therefore meet a key factor in deciding whether use of a copyrighted work is fair use. The court found that not only are the search results transformative, they are “highly transformative,” perhaps even more so than, say, a satire or a parody of a copyrighted work.
In the opinion, Judge Sandra Ikuta wrote:
a search engine may be more transformative than a parody because a search engine provides an entirely new use for the original work, while a parody typically has the same entertainment purpose as the original work.
What’s also noteworthy about the opinion, at least to me, is the high esteem in which the court, like other federal courts, hold Google for doing something good for society by making information and knowledge more accessible. The good will toward Google is clear throughout the opinion:
We conclude that the significantly transformative nature of Google’s search engine, particularly in light of its public benefit, outweighs Google’s superseding and commercial uses of the thumbnails in this case.
Something else that occurred to me as I read the decision, a development that I’ve been noticing lately: the U.S. federal courts are becoming remarkably smart and knowledgeable about the Internet and Internet technology. Go back and reread some relevant federal court decisions in 2000, 2001 and 2002 and it’s clear that back then federal judges (even in the tech-heavy ninth circuit) had less than a good grasp of the underlying technologies and facts that drove their decisions.
But the court in this case spent a great deal of effort to accurately and cogently explain the mechanics of HTML and how HTML code relates to files stored on servers and how in-line linking works, not exactly rocket science but complex nonetheless. The important point is this: you would not have seen this level of expertise in the judicial system even as recently as four years ago.
Either judges and clerks have come up a very steep learning curve over the past few years or attorneys are doing a far better job of briefing the courts, or both.
Update: Although this decision didn’t strike me as big news (despite all the pixels I spent on it), The Washington Post fronts the business section of its Thursday print edition with the ruling.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 6:16 PM | Print | Comments (0)AT&T’s CFO Rick Lindner wrapped-up Morgan Stanley’s Annual Communications Conference today and revealed a couple of interesting internal tidbits. Although some rumors are afoot that the highly anticipated Apple iPhone launch will be delayed past its scheduled late-June time frame, Lindner said that Apple has confirmed the availability of the device for June.
Lindner also said that research has shown that 60% of the iPhone buyers will come to AT&T’s wireless services from other carriers. Assuming that the one million folks who have expressed interest in buying the iPhone at AT&T’s website reflect more or less the right number of consumers who will buy the iPhone this year, other wireless carriers (Verizon Wireless, T-Mobile, Sprint-Nextel and so forth) can expect to lose around 600,000 customers as a result of AT&T’s exclusive pact with Apple.
Lindner did warn that “early on, supplies will be tight” as pent-up demand depletes iPhone inventories following launch. But still, “I do think we’ll have enough units in our distribution and enough units in Apple’s distribution to make a very good launch,” he said.
Cell service made available through the iPhone will cost about the same as AT&T’s regular service. The “pricing point is very similar to the rate plans we have today with a nice data package add-on to this service,” Lindner said.
AT&T’s other high-profile product, U-verse TV service, “is stronger than it’s ever been.” But, costs are higher than the company had projected too. Although AT&T originally pegged the capital costs of building out the fiber-to-the-node infrastructure at $4 billion to $6 billion, the telco later pinpointed the total costs to come in at $5 billion.
But, as the company has gained more experience in the build-out, it’s clear that $5 billion won’t do. Costs are now expected to fall closer to $6 billion.
Lindner said that AT&T’s decision to deploy more high-definition TV services entails far higher server costs than originally expected. Moreover, the costs of conditioning the copper loops for video service has been greater than anticipated, although the telco would have had to recondition some of these lines as part of its ongoing maintenance anyway. So, the U-verse build has had some effect in lowering overall loop rehabilitation costs that AT&T routinely incurs as part of ordinary maintenance.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 3:01 PM | Print | Comments (0)Dr. Jonathan Freedman, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and author of a book on TV violence, has written a paper (PDF here and press release here) for DC-based First Amendment-oriented The Media Institute that takes the FCC to task for issuing its highly-publicized report on TV violence.
The Commission’s April 25 report (PDF here), engineered by Chairman Kevin Martin, minced no words. It concluded outright that “exposure to violence in the media can increase aggressive behavior in children” and recommended, among other things, that Congress should adopt new laws that either limit the amount of violence on TV during certain parts of the day or mandate TV ratings (which are now voluntary) or both.
In his report Freedman says that the FCC drew skewed and self-serving conclusions from the research it reviewed and that despite the Commission’s confident assertion, studies on the causal relationship between TV violence and violent behavior are “inconsistent, weak, and generally non-supportive.” He said that in its zeal to make a case for regulating TV content, the FCC missed a chance to actually perform a public service by looking seriously at the issue. “The FCC could have paid serious attention to the actual evidence” but did not, Freedman says.
Although Freedman’s report itself tends to read like a puffy piece of propaganda (the press release is far better, actually), he makes very valid points. No causal relationship between TV violence and violent behavior has been consistently established, although some studies show a correlation between the two. Therefore, the FCC was way out of line in drawing its own seemingly firm “scientific” conclusions.
A number of years back I was involved in a three university research project on TV violence (disclosure: I was involved in this research on behalf of the cable industry and I was formerly employed by The Media Institute) and the very impressive assembled team of independent academicians studying the matter had earnestly and fruitlessly hunted for a causal relationship between TV violence and violent behavior. In fact, the researchers sometimes found the opposite result.
For example, in some of their studies very graphic and disturbing TV violence tended to reduce aggressive behavior because many of the at-risk kids involved in the research had a cartoonish concept of violence. When exposed to video that showed the realistic aftermath of, say, a gunfight, many of these kids became less violent. (One movie scene, for example, showed a gunshot victim urinating on himself and that just mortified these kids.)
In any event, nobody can definitively say what the impact of TV violence is, despite the FCC’s contention. Moreover, nobody knows how to define acceptable versus objectionable violence. Unlike p*rnography, of which Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously said “I know it when I see it,” violence is hard to pinpoint. It can mean anything from “Schindler’s List,” to “The Terminator” to Wile E. Coyote’s antics in the Roadrunner cartoons.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 11:55 AM | Print | Comments (0)
DRM technology, the bane of online music buyers, is virtually a thing of the past. Steve Jobs made a case for selling DRM-free music, record label EMI has taken the DRM-free plunge on iTunes and now Amazon plans to launch a digital music store later this year that will offer millions of songs free of copy protection.
Although details are scant, it seems that EMI will be part of Amazon’s product mix. But it also seems likely that the online retail giant has recruited other record companies to participate as well.
Finally, it seems, record companies are getting wise to the ways of selling music online. It doesn’t hurt that their industry is on a severe downswing precisely because it took so long for record labels to understand they can’t fight unauthorized music sharing with customer-alienating security technology.
With one major competitor in the bustling online music business offering its wares free of the incredibly annoying technology, which cripples the ability to transfer music from PC to PC, MP3 player to MP3 player or even burn the songs to CD-ROMs, look for a rush of announcements by other major digital music providers that they too will go DRM-free.
Update: The WSJ has more details here. Amazon’s DRM-free music will be for MP3-only and the company claims it has made deals with more than 12,000 record labels (there are a lot of tiny labels out there, so it’s not clear if any of the other major labels aside from EMI have agreed to go DRM-free.)
Update: Amazon has officially announced the launch of its music service.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 9:53 AM | Print | Comments (0)Former Netscape CEO Jim Barksdale and University of California at San Diego professor Francine Berman have this op-ed piece in today’s Washington Post that appeals to Congress for funding for the preservation of digital information. Although a topic rarely raised, vast amounts of the world’s knowledge are now stored only in digital formats which, Barksdale and Berman note, are more perishable than paper.
They cite statistics that show how quickly knowledge and information can come and go in the digital age — 44% of web sites in existence in 1998 have disappeared without a record and just try to recover all those file back-ups you made on 5 1/4-inch floppy disks. Because of the risk in having digital information just vanish, Congress appropriated $100 million in 2000 for the Library of Congress’ National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program.
But, in February a bill was passed and signed into law that rescinds $47 million of the approved funding, which further threatens an additional $37 million in private sector matching funds. A proposal is now on the table to restore $21.5 million to continue the program.
While $21.5 million, which strikes me as an extraordinarily paltry sum for the federal government, won’t go very far in helping to preserve or retrieve much information, the goal is to come up with a plan to save the most important data for future generations. Barksdale and Berman cite data from early satellite probes, including the Viking mission to Mars, and pre-1979 Landsat images of the earth as invaluable historical information that has already been lost forever.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 9:26 AM | Print | Comments (0)
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